School of Humanities and Sciences


Showing 1-7 of 7 Results

  • Robert Laughlin

    Robert Laughlin

    Anne T. and Robert M. Bass Professor in the School of Humanities and Sciences

    BioProfessor Laughlin is a theorist with interests ranging from hard-core engineering to cosmology. He is an expert in semiconductors (Nobel Prize 1998) and has also worked on plasma and nuclear physics issues related to fusion and nuclear-pumped X-ray lasers. His technical work at the moment focuses on “correlated-electron” phenomenology – working backward from experimental properties of materials to infer the presence (or not) of new kinds of quantum self-organization. He recently proposed that all Mott insulators – including the notorious doped ones that exhibit high-temperature superconductivity – are plagued by a new kind of subsidiary order called “orbital antiferromagnetism” that is difficult to detect directly. He is also the author of A Different Universe, a lay-accessible book explaining emergent law.

  • Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Ph.D

    Sandra Soo-Jin Lee, Ph.D

    Sr Research Scholar, Pediatrics - Center for Biomedical Ethics

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDr. Lee is a medical anthropologist whose research focuses on the sociocultural dimensions and ethical issues of emerging technologies and their translation into clinical practice. Dr. Lee leads studies on the public understandings of research using clinical data and biological samples, concepts of race, culture and human genetic variation, and citizen science, commercialization of biotechnology and entrepreneurship.

  • Michael Lepech

    Michael Lepech

    Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment

    BioUnsustainable energy and material consumption, waste production, and emissions are some of today’s most pressing global concerns. To address these concerns, civil engineers are now designing facilities that, for example, passively generate power, reuse waste, and are carbon neutral. These designs are based foremost on longstanding engineering theory. Yet woven within this basic knowledge must be new science and new technologies, which advance the field of civil engineering to the forefront of sustainability-focused design.

    My research develops fundamental engineering design concepts, models, and tools that are tightly integrated with quantitative sustainability assessment and service life modeling across length scales, from material scales to system scales, and throughout the early design, project engineering, construction, and operation life cycle phases of constructed facilities. My research follows the Sustainable Integrated Materials, Structures, Systems (SIMSS) framework. SIMSS is a tool to guide the multi-scale design of sustainable built environments, including multi-physics modeling informed by infrastructure sensing data and computational learning and feedback algorithms to support advanced digital-twinning of engineered systems. Thus, my research applies SIMMS through two complementary research thrusts; (1) developing high-fidelity quantitative sustainability assessment methods that enable civil engineers to quickly and probabilistically measure sustainability indicators, and (2) creating multi-scale, fundamental engineering tools that integrate with sustainability assessment and facilitate setting and meeting sustainability targets throughout the life cycle of constructed facilities.

    Most recently, my research forms the foundation of the newly created Stanford Center at the Incheon Global Campus (SCIGC) in South Korea, a university-wide research center examining the potential for smart city technologies to enhance the sustainability of urban areas. Located in the smart city of Songdo, Incheon, South Korea, SCIGC is a unique global platform to (i) advance research on the multi-scale design, construction, and operation of sustainable built environments, (ii) demonstrate to cities worldwide the scalable opportunities for new urban technologies (e.g., dense urban sensing networks, dynamic traffic management, autonomous vehicles), and (iii) improve the sustainability and innovative capacity of increasingly smarter cities globally.

    With an engineering background in civil and environmental engineering and material science (BSE, MSE, PhD), and business training in strategy and finance (MBA), I continue to explore to the intersection of entrepreneurship education, innovation capital training, and the potential of startups to more rapidly transfer and scale technologies to solve some of the world's most challenging problems.

  • Helen Longino

    Helen Longino

    Clarence Irving Lewis Professor of Philosophy, Emerita

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsI am currently pursuing research in several different areas. 1) The concept of interaction in science and philosophy. 2) The epistemology of science, especially social epistemology. 3) The contributions feminist philosophy of science can make to understanding science and sustainability policy in so-called developing countries? 4) How engagement with communities can inform philosophical analysis.

  • Stephen Luby

    Stephen Luby

    Lucy Becker Professor of Medicine, Senior Fellow at the Woods Institute for the Environment, Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies and Professor, by courtesy, of Epidemiology and Population Health

    Current Research and Scholarly InterestsDr. Luby’s research interests include identifying and interrupting pathways of infectious disease transmission in low income countries.